Freeform View now in Premiere Pro (13.1)

[Kevin-Monahan]

Freeform View for managing and sorting video footage in bins is now available in the latest version of Premiere Pro. Use this feature to organize all your video stories in one place.

Freeform View (documentation)

How it works:

1. In the Project panel or any bin, click the icon at the bottom left of the screen. The bin displays clips in an icon view
2. Note that you can group clips together by dragging them into logical groups that you can use for organizing stories.

• See the following blog post to help you succeed in using this new feature.
  • Instructions for setting up the project.

Freeform View in Premiere Pro (13.1) by Adobe

We hope you like this new Premiere Pro feature.

[Mo Moolla]

FreeForm is really interesting @kevin. The ability to tag by color and label etc is a really nice touch.

I see the long form guys being interested in "storyboarding" their offlines. With a dual or triple monitor setup this is is pure bliss.

I love the fluidity and ease of use. I definitely will use this function. Never in a million years did I think I would change from my tried and trusted list view but here we go...the fresh breeze of change is more than welcome

Great work and I applaud all those who thought this up

Well done guys

M

[Kevin-Monahan]

Editor, Piotr Toczynski of Cut to the Point, provides this overview of Freeform View in Premiere Pro (13.1)

[rokonprod]

Hi Kevin-Monahan,

I'm having some trouble when I want to drag an ordered storyboard into my sequence. It doesn't seem to recognize the orde I've put the clip in because when I drag them into my timeline it completely changes the order.

I'm trying to do what you're doing @0:32 in the video.

What I'm I doing wrong?

[idospina]

Hi rokonprod,

In order to do this, you need select the items in the order you want them added.  You will need to cmd+click (ctrl on Windows) each one to do so, because doing a rectangle selection doesn't select them in any particular order.

[Leo_Laps]

Is there any good reason for it? I mean, freeform is a great new feature, but why do I have to select the clips one by one after organizing then on freeform? It seems very counter intuitive...

[R Neil Haugen]

Premiere is assuming you selected the clips in the order you want them ... and it's kinda "sticky". You're right it isn't what you want to end up with all the time.

So you may need to deselect, then quickly click through them in the order in the free-form view.

Neil

[Rob Claisse]

I really like the idea behind this but in reality, I'm not sure how I can actually use it. My projects are pretty big with footage organised across a lot of nested bins. Even in a particular bin where there might be footage that corresponds to a particular sequence or part of a sequence, there might be 100-200 clips, making this freeform view harder to work with. It does kind of seem like this is another feature that may have worked great in theory when Adobe prototyped it on sample projects but in the real world, things aren't quite so simple with everything chucked into one bin.

I hope Adobe develops this further and give us another way to get groups of clips into this kind of view. I have an idea where you can create virtual collections of clips that would then work really well in freeform. Custom search bins could do this but unfortunately, the interface for creating search bins is so limited that it doesn't make it easy to pull clips from different bins. So either make search fully-fledged with multiple operators and direct access to specific custom metadata or maybe something along the lines of Lightroom collections where you can pick clips from different bins manual and have them appear in a collection bin. I'll post something on the UserVoice forums as a suggestion for this.

[mattchristensen]

Thank you for that input Rob. In our testing we did test bins with hundreds of clips on them, but it's true you do need to have a good bit of screen real estate to fully take advantage of those larger bins. I just wanted to add that we do offer zoom functionality via the slider at the bottom or the -/= keys and you can also use the Hand Tool (H) to move around larger bins.

[Rob Claisse]

Thanks Matt. But just to be clear the large number of clips in a bin is more of a minor issue, the big one is the fact that for freeform to work for me I'd need to be able to sort clips across multiple bins, as it's rare that any part of a sequence I'm working on would rely on a single bin, more likely 5-6 bins of sorted footage. So the second part of my comment is the more important, with some way to group clips from multiple bins with proper search bins or collections views. Cheers.

[SavannahSonja]

Loving the new Freeform View.

The only issue I've been having is how to only drag a Video Clip into the timeline. If it's a high FPS shot, I probably don't want the sound accompanying the clip and I don't see an option for this like there is in the Source Monitor.

Do I have to just drag it in from there if I don't want the audio??

[idospina]

Hi savannahsonja,

I'm glad you like the new Freeform View!

There is no way to drag video-only from any of the project views.  So you are correct, it would have to be dragged from the Source Monitor.  Although another option is to disable audio patching in the timeline or lock the audio tracks before dragging the clip.

[norrbohm]

I've used it before and liked it. I'm currently in a project and used some time to organize all my clips. Next time I opened up the project it was all back to rows neatly placed after eachother and not in the way I organized it!?!? Tried it several times now. Happens every time.